Executive summary
Problem: Humanitarian crises unfold rapidly, but digital response platforms typically took months to deploy.
Strategy: I led the design of a modular crisis response system to decouple core solutions from crisis-specific content.
Outcome: Reduced deployment velocity from months to <1 week, serving 5.5 million refugees during the Ukraine invasion and scaled to an additional 85 million people with support for 20+ ongoing global crises.
On February 24, 2022, the world watched in horror as the invasion of Ukraine triggered one the largest refugee crisis since WWII. Within weeks, more than 8.8 million people had fled the country in search of safety, 90% of whom were women and children.
In the face of this humanitarian catastrophe, Google.org committed a $1.5 million grant and deployed a Fellowship team to support the International Rescue Committee (IRC). I volunteered and was selected to serve as the UX Lead for this initiative. My mandate was to partner with the IRC and a local NGO—United for Ukraine (UFU)—to design a humanitarian response platform for millions of displaced people.
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What started as a sprint to build a single website evolved into something much larger. I realized that to truly help, we didn't just need to launch a product, we needed to engineer a scalable global response solution. Here is how I used strategic design to turn a gap in humanitarian capacity into a system that has since reached over 85 million people.
When I joined the project, the immediate challenge was the "fog of information." Essential details about housing, legal aid, and safety were scattered across disparate social media channels and siloed websites without any reliable way of knowing what could be trusted. Refugees were making life altering decisions while traumatized, disoriented, and often trying to gather information on-the-go while relying on older mobile devices with spotty 2G or 3G connections and limited data.
I established a design strategy centered on the core principle: design for the exhausted mind. This led me to make decisive—and at times counterintuitive—choices about how to design the interface, what types of content to include, and how best to convey information.
For example, we intentionally deprioritized "delight" in favor of radical clarity and low cognitive load, stripping away non-essential imagery to reduce visual noise and, most importantly, reduce data consumption ensuring the site loaded instantly even in low-bandwidth situations.
Design explorations looking at rich photography compared to a stark, radically simple approach
Our users spoke a combination of Ukrainian, Russian, and English with varying levels of proficiency in each, so I leaned on clear visual iconography as a core mechanism for communicating concepts.
Clear, simple icons were employed to ease challenges with language barriers
To ensure the platform could scale for dozens of languages—supporting Cyrillic, Arabic, and beyond—I selected Noto Sans, a typeface purpose-built for global communication.
Aspects of the design system: colors, type scales
I didn't design in a vacuum. I established a high-velocity feedback loop where overseas researchers gathered real-time insights from refugee camps, enabling rapid daily iteration based on the immediate needs of users facing trauma.
Video feedback from users of the app; blurred for privacy purposes
The result was United for Ukraine, a one-stop shop for humanitarian aid launched in record time. The platform reached 5.5 million people in its first six months, facilitating 200,000 instances of information support and helping 12,000 people find temporary housing.
Mobile components from the final design solution
Finished United for Ukraine response platform
Members of the team during a trip to Warsaw, Poland
While the Ukraine response was a success, I identified a critical systemic risk. The IRC manages dozens of crisis response efforts simultaneously, but their existing technical process for deploying a new "Signpost" (information service) website took months—time that people in a crisis simply do not have.
Map showing some of the areas where IRC Signpost is currently operating
I saw an opportunity to deliver impact far beyond Ukraine. I led the strategic generalization of our work, transforming the purpose-built Ukraine solution into a reusable global operating framework.
Applying the system to other response platforms: Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine
The pivot from "building a website" to "architecting a system" fundamentally changed the IRC's technological capacity. We reduced the time-to-market for new emergency response sites from months to less than one week.
Since the end of my fellowship, this system has been deployed across 20 global crisis zones, including Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. It has scaled to support over 85 million people globally, proving that strategic design can be a force multiplier in humanitarian aid.
This work was honored with the United Nations SDG "Connect" Award and numerous other awards for social impact.
